Marketing Features in Salesforce Summer 09

There are many new features for marketer to check out in the Summer 09 release of Salesforce.com.You will know you are using Summer 09 because the image next to the Salesforce logo at the upper left of your screen will change from a frog to a sailboat.Once you see this new image, the new features will be available to you.The changes for marketing are diverse, spanning from report improvements to campaign functionality.Release notes and details of the release can be found at http://www.salesforce.com/community/summer09 and are grouped with the Sales Cloud enhancements.

Some of my favorite new features are:

Campaign Member Fields in Email Templates is great because you can put an email template in Salesforce for your sales team to use that references a field from a campaign, which could never be done before.To set up email templates, click Setup |Communication Templates |Email Templates.

After July 2009, you can create Custom Fields on Campaign Member Records. For example, you can create fields that tracks event-specific responses like RSVP status, the offer that was responded to, seating charts, or food preferences. Your organization can create up to 500 custom fields. And you can also include campaign member custom fields in reports.This is made possible with the Campaign Member Detail Page which will be found:Setup |Customize |Campaigns |Campaign Member |Page Layouts

Other new features include:

Auto-response email and updates are now available in Salesforce.com, which means you can set up automated emails & field updates based on campaign member behavior and attributes using workflow rules.You will do this in coordination with your administrator by creating workflow rules.These can be tricky, so make sure you read about workflows prior to getting started.Once you are ready to create these rules, go to Setup |Create | Workflow & Approvals | Workflow Rules in Salesforce.com to get started.

You can also now take yourVisualforce pages and make them externally facing to create websites and landing pages using Force.com Sites.Salesforce will be doing a developer presentation on the topic of using Sites on June 22nd.You can register for it here.

New email enhancements include the ability to create email addresses like sales@yourdomain.com.The sender can then select the from address that the email will arrive from.This may be useful for internal sales associates who may send an email from the sales person, or a marketer who wants to send an email from sales.This needs to be improved though, as this feature cannot be used in mass emails or workflows (so a nurturing email sent by Salesforce.com could not arrive from a selected email).

Chart Analytics 2.0:

There have been lots of enhancements to the chart analytics in Salesforce.Below is a summary of the new enhancements, which may be very useful to marketers who struggle with current charting functionality in the system.My favorite change is the new funnel chart.One example of how to use this is to create a funnel chart to graphically illustrate your opportunity stages.

New chart types: donut and funnel

New chart colors, and styling for shading, highlights, title, legend, and axes

New data label options to show values, total, and percentages

New label truncation behavior (truncates the right side rather than the middle)

New option to show the legend on the chart for pie, donut, and funnel charts

New maximum title and text font size: to minimize text overflow, 18 point is the largest

What I love about the new release is that marketers now have new options. If they are very technical or have access to Salesforce administrators and/or developers they can start creating more robust campaigns inside their CRM. Marketers with less resources or less time can now take advantage of features like campaign specific fields inside Salesforce, while utilizing marketing automation tools like Marketo to create landing pages, sales alerts/tasks, and robust nurturing campaigns in minutes. Either way, it's a win for marketers!

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